Bitbox Project Hosts Two Bitcoin Cash Hackathons

This week news.Bitcoin.com spoke with Carlos Cardona from the open source Bitbox toolkit project. Over the next thirty days, Bitbox is hosting two BCH-centric hackathons that aim to bring the bitcoin cash development community together to build innovative applications using the decentralized network.

On April 21, and on May 15 the same day as the upcoming BCH hard fork, the open source toolkit project, Bitbox, plans to host two hackathons. Developer Carlos Cardona explains to news.Bitcoin.com that Bitbox is a suite of tools that can supercharge a developer’s BCH workflow. “It consists of a one-click Bitcoin Cash blockchain, command line utility, and a javascript API which lets you accelerate how quickly you can create an amazing application,” Cardona details.

Emerging platforms need a framework which encapsulates everything the platform offers into a suite of building blocks for developers — Bitbox is the toolset which lets you build Bitcoin Cash apps 10x faster.

In Cardona’s opinion, the greatest opportunity in the entire space is to empower developers and accelerate their workflow. “If we do that right we can set off the entire industry,” the developer explains to news.Bitcoin.com.

The Bitbox toolset.

Two Hackathons and One Very Special Upgrade

On Saturday, April 21st the hackathon will be about networking, setting up development environments and on-ramping devs to the Bitbox workflow,” Cardona explains.

May 15th is a huge opportunity to galvanize the BCH dev community as this event will get a ton of worldwide press. A lot of creative energy which has been pent-up since before the fork can begin to channel in a productive way — BCH can start to differentiate itself.

The Tuesday, May 15th hackathon will be about showcasing the new features of BCH including the 32 MB block size limit increase, new and reactivated OP codes (which Cardona has already enabled in Bitbox) and larger OP_RETURN data size. There is currently a total of two BCH in prizes for each event. One BCH for first place and 0.5 BCH for second place and 0.25 BCH each for two runners-up.

“The Bitbox toolset is general purpose,” Cardona tells news.Bitcoin.com. “If your app needs any type of BCH integration at all from entropy and mnemonics to transactions to signing messages and much more, BITBOX is the solution. We have scaffolds for react, angular, nextjs and nodejs which let you bootstrap a basic BIP44 wallet in any of those frameworks in under a minute to help get people up and going.”

Some BCH application/platform ideas:

New transaction types. We have new OP codes. What can we do with them?

More developer tools. For instance, it would be helpful to have a web GUI for the entire BCH JSON RPC similar to this.

The Birth of an Entire Industry

The Bitbox developer says that it’s his intention to showcase all of the Bitbox features as well as additional functionality after the May 15th upgrade. “The BCH toolset has app scaffolds, a paper wallet generator and console with the entire API of dozens of utility methods built in — And already supports the new OP codes and blogs posts are incoming with instructions on how to write custom scripts,” Cardona notes.

The pace of innovation on the Bitcoin Cash chain is light speed. Each week we’re seeing apps launch which push the boundaries of blockchain technology — The entire industry looks completely different than just three months ago — Imagine where we’ll be in three months. I like to look around and appreciate that I’m witnessing the birth of an entire industry. This is an incredibly special time and I’m stoked to share it with everyone involved.

What do you think about the Bitbox bitcoin cash infused hackathons on April 21 and May 15? Are you excited that developers are about to get new Op codes that may help them deliver awesome applications for BCH? Let us know what you think about these hackathons in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, Bitbox, and Twitter.

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Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written thousands of articles for news.Bitcoin.com about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

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